To see the picture of Stroud that has prompted the piece below,
please follow this link.
It’s harvest time up towards
the Heavens,
Up there, by Holy
Trinity Church in Stroud:
The quiet serenity of
late summer,
In the year of our
Lord, 1839,
When everyone ought
to know their place:
‘The rich man at his
castle,
The poor man at his
gate,
God made them high
and lowly
And ordered their
estate.’
There is a
threatening bon-fire, it’s true,
Just beyond this
imagined Eden,
The smoke of the
recent past and near future,
Reminding us all of Paradise
Lost:
The Stroudwater
weavers’ riots of 1825;
The Captain Swing
riots of 1830;
The Chartist
mass-meeting on Selsley Common,
Just a few months
before, at Whitsuntide;
The 1839 Miles Report
on
‘The Condition of the
Handloom Weavers’:
‘The weavers are much distressed; they are wretchedly off in bedding;
has seen many cases where the man and his wife and as many as 7 children have
slept on straw, laid on the floor with only a torn quilt to cover them…has
witnessed very distressing cases; children crying for food, and the parents
having neither food nor money in the house…These men have a constant dread of
going into the Poor Houses…witness has frequently told them they would be
better in the house, and their answer has been “We would sooner starve.” ‘;
The march of mill
chimneys through the valleys;
The tread of the
treadmill in the workhouse;
There’s a
conservative mythology here,
A pictorial
confabulation,
A seeming
misrepresentation:
Of glowing Cotswold
stone longevity,
The silver steady
flow of the Severn,
The shining immanence
of Doverow Hill,
The ancient tracks,
bridleways and pathways,
Of this sequestered,
pastoral, dreamtime,
Without a hint of
industrial red brick,
Or factory, canal,
turnpike, railway,
Or Darwin, Matthew
Arnold, Edmund Gosse.
Quietly flow the
Frome and the Severn,
Through Arcadia;
But the fires still
burn,
In the hearts of the
weavers,
And the hearts of the
spinners,
All along the valleys
and the hillsides.
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